TITLE: Embracing Defeat in the Colonies: The Allies & the Dismantling of the Japanese Empire After World War II
SPEAKER: Lori Watt
EVENT DATE: 07/24/2012
FORMAT: Video + Captions
RUNNING TIME: 67 minutes
TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window)
DESCRIPTION:
One of the distinctive aspects of the end of the Japanese empire in 1945 is the intersection of defeat, foreign occupation and decolonization. After defeating Japan's military, the Allies occupied all of its colonies as well as the home islands, inserting themselves between the colonizers and the colonized at a critical moment in the decolonization process. They oversaw the end of empire, including the handover of political power, redrawing of borders and transfer of newly displaced populations. Looking at the end of Japanese rule in Korea and the South Seas mandate, Lori Watt examines how Japanese military defeat complicated, and also simplified, the dismantling of the empire.
